Heavy Rain lacking innovation, doesn’t deserve the hype

Do you ever feel like you just don’t get it? Like everybody is running around you is going crazy over something, and all you see is garbage, yet you’re staring at the very same thing? Well, that’s the kind of feeling I’ve been getting recently with Heavy Rain. I saw the game at GamesCom, played the demo, read a lot online, and watched a ton of trailers, but I just don’t get it. Read more

Towards The Future: part one

It all started back in 2003. One day me and the rest of the neighborhood ( you know, back in the days when people still came over to play videogames together on the couch ) decided to go out and buy that game with the interesting-looking cover, sporting some anime-inspired artwork, and the magical word “online”. It was an RPG, and required a thing called a “nintendo broadband adapter”, or so it claimed, to play on the internet, with your gamecube. Wow, mind-blowing! At the time we still only had a 56k modem internet connection, and continuously wondered about those gaping holes on the bottom of our little purple videogame box of joy.

But then, we finally bought the game, Phantasy Star Online, it was called. It featured offline splitscreen multiplayer, still a common feature for console games back then, a singleplayer offline mode, and the ever-tempting online menu button.

At some point, we decided to buy a Broadband adapter, so that we could play mario kart in LAN mode, but when we got home, we instantly forgot all about mario kart and popped the PSO disk in, plugged in the adapter, and tried out that free one month of online play! Within a week it was impossible to get your hands on another broadband adapter; everybody in our street wanted one for PSO, and soon even neighboring towns were all-out of the little connection-peripheral.

At around the same time me and my brother finally managed to convince our dad into getting an ADSL connection, and from then on, we were absolutely hooked. We bought a second gamecube because my little brother and I didn’t want to take turns playing online, then a keyboard, which would later be complemented by an imported €80 ASCII keyboard-controller, a load of memorycards, and several copies of PSO.

So what is this ‘PSO’ you’ve been talking about?, I hear you thinking. PSO, now 10 years old, is the first-ever online multiplayer RPG game on any gaming console, and was a source of inspiration for modern games such as Monster Hunter, Lost Planet, and Guild Wars. Some say PSO, in turn, draws inspiration from Diablo.
Heavily influenced by popular japanese cartoon drawings called “manga”, the game is set in a sci-fi space exploration story, and truely shines in simplicity. It would even go as far as calling it an Online Arcade-RPG due to it’s simplicity in design and gameplay, and clearly shows a Sonic Team (the game’s developer) that is still getting the hang of creating 3D games.
PSO was first released on the Sega Dreamcast, but after the demise of the DC, PSO was ported to the Xbox and Gamecube, with an extra episode, quests, items, and received a large number of refinements.

Nisute Event: Game programming essentials 2

So what will we be covering?

The second session will focus mainly on use of functions, general rules of thumb when programming, object-oriented code, and putting those into practice with the material from the first session.

For those who are interested:

This second session will be held on Monday the 15th of February at 1pm (GMT+1/CEST), with a length of 2 hours.

With our unique look at the gaming industry, and all of the people we meet, we often hear our members and outsiders express their interrests in pursuing a career in game development or media. Interestingly, they all come to us with the same question, and so we’ve decided to set up an event to cater to part of this question: is making videogames something for me, and what does it take?At this point we have the knowledge for organizing a game programming essentials course in-house, and so that’s exactly what we’ve set up. For us, the goal of this 2-hour pilot-course is to see if there is enough interest from people to warrant organizing more sessions, and see if we can arrange some guest speakers on various topics.

Things to bring:

A laptop with windows xp/vista/7/mac os x

bloodshed dev-cpp or apple xcode (comes with your mac install dvd), depending on wether  you run windows or mac os x.

Please make sure to have these ready for use when you walk in the door!

Location:

NiSuTe International office
Street: Graaf Engelbertstraat 50
Postal: 5046 LW Tilburg, The Netherlands
Phone: +31135358331
Costs: €0

prior experience required:

some knowledge about variables, operators, and simple operations (covered in the first session). Don’t worry if you weren’t there though, you’ll do just fine!

Time & date:

Currently scheduled to start on Monday the 15th of February at 1pm (GMT+1/CEST), with a length of 2 hours.

Registration:

Registration prior to attending is mandatory, to do so, send an email to lketelaars at nisute . com specifying your name, and phone number, as well as any special requests such as language preferences (ie. you’d prefer it to be in English or Dutch). Emails can be sent in either Dutch or English, Book your reservation now, it’s free anyhow!

However, if you’ve signed up for the first session then you will not need to register again for this one.

Industry choosing iphone, abandoning wii?

I think the iPhone makes a difference in the videogame space in a sense where it allows the industry to re-invent itself. Let me explain to you why.

If anything over the past few months stood out to me in terms of news and announcements, then I’d have to go with this trend of big developers and publishers seemingly losing interest in Nintendo’s white box of fun and starting to show their love to Apple’s iPhone. We’ve all seen big name publishers statements, thought mostly informal, with regards to the slow game sales on the Wii. And where some developers switch to PS3/360 development, others turned to the iPhone (or both). EA, Sega, Capcom, Square Enix and others have all started creating iPhone games in one form or the other. Read more

Not quite there: Fairytale Fights

Dutch game developer Playlogic Games’ new title Fairytale fights certainly was a game that managed to catch our attention at GamesCom last year. I mean mix Fairytales with “kiddy” visuals, throw in some Happy Tree Friends and you’re sure to get some attention. So after our positive first impression at GC, we were pretty eager to spend some time with the game.

Roughly 4 months later and you can find the game on shelves at your local videogame retailer, so we figured it was about time to finally play through the full version.

Fairytale rights is a fantasy hack and slash game, released for windows computers, playstation3 and xbox 360 and has received the PEGI 16, and ESRB Mature ratings in europe and the US respectively (click on the ratings to view game-specific rating details). Having played the game extensively, I would highly recommend parents to not let kids below that age to play it. Now with that out of the way, let’s talk gameplay.

Right off the bat I just couldn’t resist checking the credits, and sure enough, some ten or so familiar names popped up, even putting our university in the credits. Pretty neat!

When you first pop the game into your system and start playing you immediately notice the rich color scheme and fun re-imagining of a range of fairytale characters that we’ve all come to love when we were little. But this game is far from intended for the disney crowd, instead going with bucketloads of blood and mindless violence. But hey, with the box art of this game, nobody should be surprised by that!

Our first impression was still the same as it was back on GamesCom (a hack and slash game, drawing inspiration from happy tree friends and fairy tales), so we skipped straight through the mandatory intro screens and set off to hurt anything that moved.

I’d say the single player mode took us about 20 hours to complete. You can also play through the “story” in online mode, effectively creating a 4-player co-op game, or do the same using the offline multiplayer co-op mode. The game also offers an on-, and offline multiplayer battle mode, allowing players to fight Vs. each other, but we found this mode of play to be fairly useless and much less fun than the story mode since there is no end to the battle, nor does it matter wether or not you kill a friend. I felt the multiplayer battle mode had potential but left much to be desired.

Going through the story mode, you are presented with a wide variety of weaponry, ranging from a lollypop to a tree branch, to a big axe. These can be picked up from beaten enemies or.. just about anywhere in the game, seeing as it’s literally filled with item and money chests, ready for you to be raided. After a while though, we started getting annoyed with them since there were simply so many and we stopped bothering to open them apart for grabbing a new weapon.

Wielding one of these many weapons, the player goes though a series of tales as they slay lumberjacks, gingerbread men, even leprechauns. The environments in FTF look great, all fit with the story you’re playing in, and the way they throw in some neat little details add to the impression of the game’s level design in a positive sense.

Sadly, not all is well in fairy tale land, because for some reason Playlogic decided it was a good idea to leave out the invisible walls we’ve all grown so accustomed to in other games, and in this case, that decision was a mistake. The problem is that you can easily walk off the level, get beaten off it by an enemy, or (thats a bit uncommon, but it happened to us) get stuck in the level geometry.

The level design is also set up in a way that frequently makes it difficult to estimate just where you’re going to land when you jump, resulting in us unintentionally jumping off the level several times in a row, falling off narrow ledges and other objects.

As we sliced our way though the world of FTF, we often pondered the question where they hid variety. You see, from the first to the last, including bosses, all you do is walk, slice, fall of level, re-spawn, and repeat that endlessly. About halfway through the game we ran across a maze, but thats about the only bit of variety we can recall in the entire game.

The game is set up as a number of fairy tales, each with a set of chapters with a boss battle looming at the end. Sadly, we found these battles, and the game’s difficulty, for that matter, to be consistently disappointing. The fighting doesn’t get any harder as you progress through the game, and the boss battles are either fun but extremely short and simple, or straight forward but too long and repetitive, and thous, boring.

Recap

The humor and fun details in the game add to the fun atmosphere that FTF has going on, and the graphics only add to this. However, the sheer amount of times we’ve frustratingly simply fell off the levels for no good reason, and the fact hat the amount of time we’ve died that way was roughly equal to the amount of enemy lives we took, definitely took away (in a big way) from any enjoyment of playing FTF.

If we add everything up, I’d say FTF is a game that had a lot of potential, but feels rushed and even though there are some very nice levels, overall, it could use some extra attention to the leveldesign.

FTF, for these reasons feels more like a downloadable PSN or Xbox Live Arcade game you’d buy for €9,99, rather than a full-blown €50 title. The game concept is nice, but it’s execution is lacking and disappointing, sadly.

Nisute Presents: Game programming essentials

Today I get to be the guy to proudly present to you a special event that we have been working on here at nisute. With our unique look at the gaming industry, and all of the people we meet, we often hear our members and outsiders express their interrests in pursuing a career in game development or media. Interestingly, they all come to us with the same question, and so we’ve decided to set up an event to cater to part of this question: is making videogames something for me, and what does it take?At this point we have the knowledge for organizing a game programming essentials course in-house, and so that’s exactly what we’ve set up. For us, the goal of this 2-hour pilot-course is to see if there is enough interest from people to warrant organizing more sessions, and if we can arrange some guest speakers on various topics. Read more

New PS3 ad appears, shows respect to the elderly

A new PS3 television ad had surfaced this week, and quite frankly, it’s hilarious. I’ve been watching the new PS3 ads and Sony seems to be doing a good job marketing the PS3 in the US, but us Europeans? Not so much. I can’t recall seeing any PS3 ads over here in the past 6 months at all. Nevertheless, take a look at this one, it’s amusing. I certainly hope we’ll see these in europe at some point.

Read more

Hoax of the month: Wii2 + BluRay

Several smaller online gaming publications started publishing stories about a rumored Wii2 this week. A visitor at nintendo HQ supposedly walked in on a couple of developers watching a BD (BluRay) movie on a Wii. Who then supposedly quickly tried to cover everything. The original article mentions a channel with a BD logo on it and a disk being put back into a BD case.

As a happy PS3 owner, and a disgruntled Wii owner, the article sparked my attention just like everyone elses, but seemed too good to be true. A quick background/source check turned up absolutely nothing, which could mean two things: 1) it’s a hoax, or 2) it’s an exclusive and the rest of the internet hasn’t discovered it yet since it’s a small(er) website.

Not know which one it was, I decided to let this one slide for a few days, see what the internet would do, and then write something about it. And Boy! was I happy I did that!

Nintendo announces steep Wii sales drop

The moment has finally arrived. Well, that’s what you’d say at first glance when you take a look at the sales numbers which were released by Nintendo this week. They’re expecting an almost 20% drop in console sales this year despite the price-cut from $249 to $199, announced last September.

Nintendo is of course having an increasingly difficult time competing with Sony and Microsofts’ offerings which are looking more and more like an attractive option over Nintendo’s shiny white box.

The big N is hoping for a brighter holiday season, but to be completely honest, we don’t. The flattened-gamecube with waggle controller was originally brought as the biggest revolution in gaming history, but instead turned out to be more comparable to nintendo selling it’s soul and fanbase in return for a purely money-hungry market exploiting company. Nintendo fans, and gamers in general have abandoned Nintendo completely, leaving two platforms with mostly shovel-ware behind to gather dust for your mom and little sis to poke around with.

I can personally only hope for Microsoft and Sony to pick up where Nintendo left off, and as much as I dislike Natal, I think that Sony and Microsoft are going to give Nintendo a run for it’s money when the playstation wiimote and xbox natal hit the shelves.

Wishful thinking; GT5 box contents

If you’re a Gran Turismo fanatic, then it’s almost impossible that you’re not aware of this weeks’ news that a GT5 box made an appearance on Mercedes-Benz’s website in an introduction video of the new Mercedes SLS AMG. What’s interesting about this, is the fact that the box contains not one, but three blu-ray discs, leaving gamers wondering what could be on them. So I figured I’d make an educated guess. Wishful thinking, maybe. But interesting nonetheless! Read more

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